In the last tutorial, we made this cool day for night project. And we made these stars in form just by changing the particle type. What we're going to do here is add some fog. And actually, we're going to add, do this in a separate comp. Because it's going to, it's going to slow things down. But we're going to tweak some of the other particle settings to in order to achieve this effect. Go over to the other particle settings, start composition. And apply the form effect to the form solid. And I, intentionally made this comp extremely sparse and bare bones.

Because fog as we're going to make it here, really slows down at least my computer. So what I'm going to do is open up Base Form and I'm going to change the particles in z to 2, so we have a little bit of depth here, but not much. Also going to zoom out, so we can see everything here and increase size x until our comp goes to the edges of the screen lower center xy. The right side here increase that value to lower our little fog bank here and actually I want to increase size y. So we have a little bit more surface area to our fog. I also want to take down particles in x maybe to about 30 and also particles in y to about 30 and I realize again that looks really Spread out but it's not once we start fiddling with this.

I'm going to close a base form, open up the particle section. I'm going to change the particle type to cloudlet. And just so you can see this here I'm gong to increase the size a little bit. And again the cloudlet makes these random little cloudy type shapes. And this is great for making fog, I realize this looks nothing like fog. But it will in just a moment. Now, the thing with fog, here's how we do it or smoke usually. But what we do is we increase size to a ridiculously huge amount, and we take opacity down to a ridiculously small amount.

So let me show you what I'm talking about here. I'm going to increase size getting bigger here. And the reason why fog slows down my machine, at least, is that the size value seems to, as you increase it, it slows form down a lot. So in order to have really good fog, we need big size. And again, that tends to increasingly slow down my machine. I'm also going to take down the opacity and as we do, we'll start to see some of this cloudy, foggy texture showing through.

You see even just at the top here is just looking a little bit more cloudy. Let's go and take that down to like one. And now we're kind of getting somewhere. Let's go ahead and increase the opacity random so that different little puffs of cloud here take on different levels of opacity, maybe down to about 75. Let's go ahead and do this same thing for size random as we increase that. We're randomizing the size of those little cloudlet particles and somewhere around 75 is good for that as well. Whoops there we go.

Now, you can see as we start lowering opacity that it looks foggy but now we can kind of see the size of these particles. So we now need to go back and increase the size, of, our, Cloudlets here, maybe even increase the, in the base forum, this size x, because we're starting to see a little bit of shading on those edges. There we go, close that back up. And now we can take down the opacity, even to like 0.8 or something, to kind of lower that even more.

Now this does look a little too uniform. It looks like a wall of fog, and we don't really want that. We want more randomness, and more size variation. And we probably want that in different places as well. Maybe as like the fog rises, it gets a little bit thinner. But we won't know how to do that until we talk about color maps or quick maps a little bit later on. In the training, I'm going to change the color from white to more of a light periwinkle. This will mimic what's going on in our other shot, here.

Let's go ahead and see what this looks like. I'm going to go ahead and select this entire layer, not the effect, just the entire layer, and I might need to click away from that and then click it again to select it. Then press Cmd + C on the Mac to copy your Command, or Ctrl + C on the PC to copy. Come over here to press Ctrl + V on the PC or Cmd + V on the Mac to to paste, and now we can see that we have that fog here. You'll also notice that this slows way down and it's a little, a little brutal on the old computer when you make fog. So I'm going to increase the Y value, the center X value to lower that even more. I might also want to have less particles in X, maybe 25. So, just kind of make this a little bit more sparce, we also might want to go to our disperse and twist and increase disperse a little bit to kind of move those particles around a little bit.

And you can see the problem with the small cloud particles is it does kind of look more fake. We really want big areas of fog here. And so it's just kind of a back-and-forth playing around with size and opacity, because as we increase the size, let's say we increase the size to 100, then we have way too much in terms of opacity, and it's, it's a little strong. So another thing, one thing we could do Is actually select the form layer, press the letter T to reveal the opacity property.

And take down the opacity here. The downside of that is that we're not really changing how these cloud particles interact with each other. We're just controlling the particles, the opacity of the entire layer itself. And in this case, that actually tends to work pretty good. And we have what looks like pretty good fog. We might want to actually increase the saturation of this just a little bit. So we have a little bit more blue in our fog to match the rest of our background, maybe that's a little hardcore. Somewhere in between those two.

There we go and now we have some really cool fog added. So here's the before and the after. And again, it's a little harsh, probably so you can see it, but it does add a nice atmosphere. And later we'll learn about how to add some kind of turbulence to this and how to animate it in a way that would be believable.

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Released

6/13/2013

One of the most popular and yet complex plugins for Adobe After Effects, Trapcode Form is a unique particle system that creates stunning and professional results. Instead of generating particles, Form's particles just exist. This course helps you bridge the gap to mastery of Trapcode Form. Author Chad Perkins introduces Form's properties, base forms, and particle types, and then moves on to mapping Form particles to 3D objects and creating effects like organic fireballs and 3D holograms. He also shows how to light particles in After Effects, integrate audio, and create 3D Form objects. The course includes three sample projects that are highly applicable to real-world client requests, including dissolving a logo design.

This course was created and produced by Chad Perkins. We are honored to host this content in our library.